Paul Wellstone

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. I would yield for a question in just a moment. Mr. President, I want to continue to read this article first. On the Minnesota side, most of East Grand Forks was under order to evacuate-- Mr. President, I will yield for a question, but just for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. But, Mr. President, the fact of the matter is that it is only in theory. My colleague has constructed this theory, and it is a theory that employees have a choice. I have organized with people at workplaces. I have worked with people who are working under conditions that I sometimes say to them, ``Look, you are going to lose your hearing. Or, you're breathing in substances that are going to take years of your life.'' They said, ``We have no choice. This is the only job we can find.'' People do not always have the choice. It is not an equal power relationship; that is not the world of the workplace. And even if my colleague was right--and I wish he was and this theory would turn out to be true and it would be the reality--why not, if you want a piece of legislation, why not err on the side of caution? Why not have a clear provision as in the alternative by Senators Baucus and Kerrey and Landrieu? Why not have clear protection against that discrimination? The second thing is, you can say that employees are protected from coercion, but it is not clear that that protects them from the discrimination. Mr. President, the third point is whether or not people will be able to take their accumulated comptime and use it when they need to. And we do not have any guarantee of that in this legislation. So, Mr. President, I think that the women's organizations and labor organizations that have written their letters and said, look, this is not going to help working people, are right on the mark. Mr. President, I also want to cover for a moment the differences between the Federal workers program and S. 4. Let me just go over some things. Federal employees--I will read for a moment--have job protections that private sector workers do not. Federal workers are covered by civil service rules requiring good cause for discharge or discipline. Private employees typically are at-will employees, who an employer can fire or discipline for any reason or no reason. As long as we are talking about parity, maybe we ought to turn this around. Mr. President, I would be pleased to go back to this debate later on. But now I want to focus on what I think is the most important priority for this Congress, and that is to get disaster relief to people in my State and to other States where people have been affected by the floods. I would like one more time to say, I am sorry. I mean, I apologize to my colleague from Missouri, and I apologize to other colleagues for the inconvenience. But I have promised myself that I would do everything I could do. And I think maybe by speaking on the floor and holding the floor, I can get attention to this unfinished business, that I can put some pressure on people here--I am just being very honest about it--and I can just fight. This is the way you fight. I hope, I say to my colleagues, that this disaster relief bill is put on the fast track and that people will get the work done. I want to be real clear that this has been, up until the last couple days before the Memorial Day recess, the opposite of sour. It was bipartisan. Thank you. I mean, thank you, Republicans; thank you, Democrats. We worked together. We put together a really good package. Senator Stevens was very sensitive and very committed to what we were saying and went out of his way to help. The majority leader, Senator Lott, was helping us. I do not believe that the House of Representatives being unwilling to deal with this, instead going home, was what the majority leader wanted. But this is the deck of cards that we have been dealt. At this point in time, it is really a moral outrage. I am going to stay at this until the Congress does the right thing for the people in Minnesota, the people in the Dakotas. This is an article written by Nick Coleman, Tim Nelson, and Brian Bonner, who are staff writers for the Pioneer Press. This will give colleagues a feel for why I am out here. This was written on Saturday, April 19, 1997: The river won. The Red River of the North overwhelmed months of massive efforts to keep it at bay Friday, bursting over, around and through the dikes of Grand Forks and East Grand Forks, Minn., surging down evacuated streets and rapidly drowning hundreds of homes. Air raid sirens on both sides of the bloated river wailed ominously all day and night as first one dike, then another succumbed to the river, which in a few short hours made a mockery of the effort to contain it. Late last night, Grand Forks Mayor Pat Owens interrupted local TV programming to urge the entire city of 50,000 people to voluntarily evacuate their homes and businesses and prepare for possible forced evacuation. With the Red on the rise last night to a predicted crest of 54 feet--a full 25 feet above flood stage--the overmatched dike sagged like the sides of a child's sandcastle at the beach. By the end of the day, several abandoned neighborhoods were swamped in roof-high water. After darkness fell, the situation appeared critical: Water had begun to seep up through downtown sewers, and the city's emergency operation center was forced to move from downtown to the outlying University of North Dakota. On the Minnesota side, most of East Grand Forks was under order to evacuate and 400 additional National Guardsmen were on the way to aid the city of 8,000. And I say to my colleagues, I was there the day that people from East Grand Forks evacuated. And the people, they were like refugees. People were dazed. Normally divided by the Red River, the two cities found themselves joined in misery by a spreading river that knows no borders. At nightfall, the last bridge linking them was nearly submerged. A should have said earlier also that one of the amazing things was the way in which--and this would be the same thing in Missouri or Kansas--people from the adjoining towns took people into their homes. It was amazing. People showed up. Even towns with all the rivalry where the high schools were always in big football games against one another, and people hardly had a good thing to say about one another, partly out of rivalry, people just welcomed their neighbors. That was the goodness of people. That is what is so frustrating. People have done it right. They have done exactly what they are supposed to do. They have showed a real sense of community. This Congress has showed no sense of community. People back in Grand Forks and East Grand Forks and Warren and Ada, you name it, and other communities, they have shown a real sense of goodness. We have not.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I actually will not yield for a question right now because I want to respond to the first question first. Mr. President, I will just say to my colleague--and I put him at a disadvantage because I have the floor right now--that based upon my knowledge of him, and I do not know his as well as I would like to, I think he would be doing the same thing. There comes a point in time when you do not have any other choice. You have to use your language. You have to be out there fighting for people in your State. We tried to appeal, I say to my colleague, in answering this question, we tried to appeal to common sense. That did not work. We tried to appeal to the goodness of people. That did not work. We tried to appeal on the basis of ``we have supported you when your States have been hit with these disasters and please support us.'' That did not work. The leadership in the House, if you can call it leadership, did something which is unconscionable. They just went into recess. It was insensitive. And now I come back and people are still waiting. We do not even know whether they are going to do it this week. So I say to my colleague, yes, if it means I am inconveniencing colleagues, Republicans or Democrats, I am sorry, but this is what I am going to do. And, you know, I will be here for a while and I will stay at this all week and next week if I have to, as well. I am going to fight for people in Minnesota. No apologies. By the way, it does not matter to me whether or not the people who were flooded out of the homes were Republicans or Democrats or Independents or none of the above. They are entitled to some assistance, and they are entitled to it now. This Senate is not going to be conducting business as usual until we get our priorities straight. In response to the first question, I guess this is an honest disagreement. I mean, this letter says that someone could be pressured into taking comptime when she really wants or needs overtime pay. That is what I have been talking about. I believe they are right.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, let me respond to my colleague's second question first. I am very well aware of the fact that Senators may want to come to the floor with amendments and I have said a number of times, and my colleague has been here during this long afternoon, I apologize for the inconvenience, but, quite frankly, right now my focus is not on whether or not some Senators can bring some amendments to this bill. My focus is on men, women, and children back in Minnesota, in communities, many of whom have been flooded out of their homes, have been devastated, many of whom have supported one another, have loved one another. And right now they have been waiting and waiting and waiting, and waiting, and the House of Representatives went into recess and did not pass a disaster relief bill. A disaster is a disaster. And an emergency supplemental is an emergency supplemental. So I am going to continue to be on the floor and I am going to continue to speak. If that means that the Senate cannot conduct business as usual, then I say to my colleague, that is the way it should be. Because, quite frankly, at this moment, at this point in time, my one priority is to fight like heck for people back in the State.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I am sorry, I am being careful about keeping the floor. I will be pleased to yield for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I will be pleased to yield in just one moment. I will finish reading the letter and I will be pleased to yield: . . . supporters argue that S. 4 is voluntary and employees have a ``choice,'' yet working women who have for decades faced subtle (and not-so-subtle) forms of discrimination are all too familiar with the potential consequences of not going along with the employers' wishes: isolation, intimidation and retaliation; and . . . because employees do not control when or if they can use their comp time, they are essentially being asked to gamble on the chance that they will be able to take time when it is as valuable to them as overtime pay. This is pretty important because my understanding, with Federal employees get to make that choice. That is a big difference here: . . . because employees do not control when or if they can use their comptime they are essentially being asked to gamble on the chance that they will be able to take time when it is as valuable to them as overtime pay. This is my point again. We had an amendment which would improve this bill. We could pass this bill which says: Look, you bank that time. It's your time. It's your earned compensation. If you have compelling reasons that you need that time off, sickness of child, sickness of parent--you know, what's in the Family and Medical Leave Act--you should be able to take the time off. You should not have to ask the employer. It's your time: S. 4 must be defeated. Women want flexibility in the workplace, but not at the risk of jeopardizing their overtime pay or the well-established 40 hour work week. Sincerely, 9 to 5, National Association of Working Women, American Nurses Association, Business and Professional Women, National Council of Jewish Women, National Women's Law Center, Women's Legal Defense Fund. Leadership Conference on Civil Rights. I might also add there is a coalition of 180 national civil rights, religious and working women's organizations which oppose this legislation: League of Women Voters, National Women's Political Caucus, National Women's Law Center, American Association of University Women, National Organization for Women, Women's Legal Defense Fund, National Counsel of Senior Citizens, NAACP, National Urban League, National Council of La Raza, Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund, Union of American Hebrew Congregations, Southern Christian Leadership Conference, National Council of Churches. Mr. President, in addition, and then I will yield for a question, a couple of other organizations: Mechanical Contractors Association of America, Incorporated, National Electrical Contractors Association, Sheet Metal and Air Conditioning Contractors' National Association, AFL-CIO, American Nurses Association, National Education Association, American Federation of Teachers, Union of Needle Industry and Textile Employees, Service Employees International Union, Communications Workers of America, United Steelworkers of America, Communications Workers of America, United Auto Workers, the International Association of Machinists, Laborers' International Union of North America, United Brotherhood of Carpenters, International Brotherhood of Teamsters, International Association of Bridge, Structural and Ornamental Iron Workers, American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees. Mr. President, you know, it has become fashionable to do all this bashing of unions, but I have to say this. As a matter of fact, above and beyond all these women's organizations, unions really in the last half of the century-plus have been the only institutions which have consistently represented the bottom half of the population, those people who do not own all the capital and do not own the big corporations and depend on the wages and depend on being able to get overtime when they work overtime, and depend upon being able to bring in the resources to support families. It would seem to me, if this was such a great deal for working families and for working women, the very organizations which represent women and so many working people in this country would be all for it. Yet, you have major opposition. So, I will be pleased to yield for a question, if the Senator has a question. But otherwise I will continue to make the case that this legislation, in its present form, is going nowhere. I am sorry for that, because my colleague has worked hard on it. But this legislation, it really violates some very cherished principles that have to do with fairness in the workplace: Decent wages, overtime wages for overtime work, and giving employees--employees--employees the flexibility. This legislation does not do that, Mr. President. Now, Mr. President, since I have not been asked to yield for a question----

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I see that I have another 15 minutes to speak about this legislation before being able to focus my attention on my major priority here today, which is the need to get disaster relief to the people in Minnesota and the Dakotas and other States, who deserve our help. Mr. President, let me read a letter that I think is extremely important as we go through and debate this piece of legislation. Dear Senator Lott and Senator Daschle: The undersigned national organizations represent many of the working women of today. We believe passage of S. 4, the Family Friendly Workplace Act, fails to offer real flexibility to the working women it purports to help while offering a substantial windfall to employers. We urge you to delay consideration until a real solution can be found which truly meets the needs of working women and families. Nearly half of the work force is women and the number of women working multiple jobs has increased more than four fold in the last 20 years. S. 4 would affect hourly workers, and most hourly workers are women. The majority of minimum wage workers are women. Many of these women depend on overtime pay. Many of them want more control of their schedules, not less. Without strong protections for workers, the comptime bill will cut women's options and women's pay. For example-- And I will just read slowly. Someone pressured into taking comp time when she really wants or needs overtime pay is taking an involuntary pay cut; Let me repeat that. That's an argument I have been making. These organizations which I will list in a moment are right on the mark: Someone pressured to taking comp time when she really wants or needs overtime pay is taking an involuntary pay cut[.] So, again I would say, when it comes to the enforcement machinery, you have to deal with this whole issue.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I have not yielded the floor. Mr. President, I was getting ready to yield to my colleague. He looked like he was raising his hand to ask a question. So, if he had a question, I was going to yield for the question, that's all.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I have the floor.

Mr. WELLSTONE

Mr. WELLSTONE. Let me just respond to my colleague in two different ways. First of all, a pay cut where people are no longer able to get overtime pay or may be put in a position that they do not get overtime, time off for overtime worked doesn't help anyone. It does not help working women. It does not help working men. And it does not help working families. It is, if you will, elementary. Second of all, as a matter of fact, if you look at the alternative-- this is what puzzled me about my colleague here. If you look at the alternative that is being presented by Senators Baucus and Kerrey and other Democrats, and I would assume there would be Republican support, as a matter of fact, that is exactly what we are talking about, which is what you have in this alternative. You have comptime--that is what it is about. It does not abolish the 40-hour week. It does not amount to a pay cut. It is time-and-a-half off for every hour you have worked overtime. It provides the protection against the discrimination so employers are not able to only give overtime to people who take comptime as opposed to people who need the overtime pay. It makes sure that you get the flexibility that we say the employees want. That is part of it. The other part of it is, in all due respect to some of the employers in our country, not all of them --there are, of course, many great employers--the fact is--and in the subcommittee we heard testimony to this effect. The fact of the matter is, right now there are all sorts of opportunities for flexibility. You don't have to overturn the Fair Labor Standards Act. People can work 4 10-hour days and then take a Friday off or a Monday off; they can work 9-hour days and work half a day Friday or take every other Friday off; people can come in at 7 and leave at 3; they can come in at 10 and leave at 6. There are employers right now that provide employees with that flexibility. The real problem is that a lot of employers don't give employees that flexibility. So, all of a sudden I become a little skeptical, as a Senator from Minnesota, where we put a real value on economic justice and work and families, when the very people who do not give the employees the flexibility they could right now, come in and testify to the need for this bill. I remember we had testimony from a representative of the National Federation of Independent Businesses saying, ``Look, we need to do this because we can't afford to pay overtime.'' All of a sudden I am saying to myself, ``My gosh, this is not family friendly. This is going to lead to the functional equivalent of pay cuts. This is not about giving people the choice and flexibility they need.'' Mr. President, we had an amendment in subcommittee. It was turned down. It's part of the alternative. It works like this: If you bank comptime and, for example, you have 20 hours that you have earned, it's your time. Now, if you have to go to your child's school, if you need to go visit with the principal or a teacher, or you need to take care of a family member, you can use your accumulated comptime to get that time off. We could do that. Then we would have real employee flexibility. Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that I be able to yield for the Chair to make an appointment and that I not lose my right to the floor and that my resumption on the floor not be counted as a second speech.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I would be pleased to take a question in one second. Let me just finish this. Let me just finish it real quickly. I have to go back to this case of whose side are you on. We are on the side of working families when we make it clear that the 40-hour week is protected. And if you work overtime, you are entitled to time- and-a-half pay. We are on the side of working families when we make it clear that if you want to get some time off to be with your families and you have worked overtime, you should get time and a half. We are on the side of working families when we have a piece of legislation that makes it crystal clear that no employer can discriminate and put people in a position where the only kind of overtime work they are going to get is if it is your comptime and not overtime pay. We are on the side of working families when we make it clear that for family and medical leave reasons, if you have banked your time and you have 30 hours of banked time and now you have a child sick or you have a parent that is ill, you can take that time off. You do not have to ask for permission. None of those features are in this legislation right now, and therefore this legislation in its present form will go nowhere. And, yes, there will be amendments on the floor of the Senate, and, yes, there will be efforts to improve this bill. But as long as I have the floor, there are not going to be any amendments until we get to the disaster relief bill. Now, I am not going to be able to stay on the floor forever, but that is going to be the point. Now, Mr. President, I want to make it clear I can only yield for questions. So I cannot yield--I think the Senator mentioned he wanted to answer, he wanted to answer what I have said, and I would ask the Chair, am I correct, the Senator--I think he may have meant it differently. The Senator said I would like to answer the question. Am I correct I can't let the Senator answer any question; I can only yield to a question? So, Mr. President, I would be pleased only to yield for a question from my colleague.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Let me just make the point if I could, Mr. President, it is really quite astounding, and it says something very fundamental about where we are in this debate. Thirty-eight percent of hourly workers earning overtime pay are women; 11.6 million women work over 40 hours each week. This is 22 percent of working women. Mr. President, this is not surprising. This is not surprising at all because we have got in our country--let me just make this clear. In our country we have a paradox. On the one hand, we have this affluence which we are grateful for, but on the other hand, we have many families who are still unable to make a decent living and raise their children successfully, and many women are working full-time and many women are working overtime. You have an alternative bill, if we wanted to have some give-and-take discussion, you have an alternative bill of Senator Baucus, Senator Kerrey, and others which makes it clear that what we do is take in part what the Senator from Missouri has done, but we extend it and we say, look, there are going to be penalties and we are going to have some protection against discrimination so that an employer cannot say to a woman who is working, or, for that matter, a man, look, we will give you overtime if you take comptime but we will not give you overtime pay. That is unacceptable. It is just simply unacceptable. And, Mr. President, that is where we say, if you will, in the words of Florence Reese, which side are you on? That is where we draw the line.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, a couple of points I would like to make to my colleague. The first one is, we will get to some of those amendments. We filed amendments. But I have to say to my colleague that we are not likely to get to those amendments until we pass a disaster relief bill. So the first answer to his question is just that; I do not think we are going to get to these amendments until we pass the disaster relief bill. The second point I would make to my colleague is that I will be very interested in all of these figures. I do know that in, roughly speaking, 60 percent of the cases of families with incomes under $20,000 a year, you have a worker who depends upon overtime pay. And whether or not we are talking about women or men, it seems to me this is terribly important. Of women who work overtime, 38 percent of hourly workers earning overtime pay are women--38 percent. And 11.6 million women work over 40 hours each week. Let me repeat that--11.6 million women work over 40 hours each week. This is 22 percent of the working women in this country. And 6.2 million women work over 48 hours each week. This is 12 percent of working women. And 2.3 million women work over 59 hours each week. This is the 4 percent of working women. So let me just----

Mr. WELLSTONE. I would be pleased to yield for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I say to my colleague, he raises a couple of important questions and good questions. The fact that the law does not work so well now does not mean that we now make the existing law even weaker with the hope that somehow it will work better. That is my first point. My second point, Mr. President, is that we have a backlog. We have a significant backlog of cases, and my understanding is that another problem with the bill is that not only does the bill not exclude certain categories of workers, like people in the garment industry that should be excluded given the existing record, but you don't have the existing woman- and man-power enforcement. We are going to need more of that. Third, I say to my colleague, I think what he is talking about would be helpful especially if we wanted to pass a piece of legislation and one of the areas where we would really have to toughen this up is we have to make sure that there is not any discrimination here. I talked about this earlier. What I was talking about earlier is what many people as they now come to find out--at first I think people really liked the bill when they first heard about it. They liked the bill because my colleague is on to something important and he is trying to do something I think important. And that is, people were saying look, you know, if there is a way that we could have more flexibility and could be able to spend more time at home and we could have the flexibility to get the comptime and time-and-a-half off instead of time-and-a-half wages, we would like to have that option. But what people are deathly afraid of, and for good reason, is what's going to happen is that in the absence of some sort of protection here against discrimination, there is going to be no guarantee that all too many employers are going to basically say, well, Senator Ashcroft and Brian Ahlberg and Paul Wellstone, there are three of you. Now, Brian Ahlberg and Senator Ashcroft, you two folks, you want overtime work and you are willing to take time-and-a-half off but not time-and-a-half pay. We will give you the overtime work because, as an employer, as a company, I don't want to give you the time-and-a-half pay. That is a huge problem. If we do not have some sort of a way in which we can guarantee that you will not have that discrimination, then a whole lot of families that are struggling to make ends meet may not be able to get that overtime pay that they depend upon. So, Mr. President, let me just make it crystal clear that the bill's penalties right now for coercion do not cover the discrimination that we are worried about. And I would just make it clear that one of the things we might want to do is accept the Kennedy amendment which was turned down in committee that deals with discrimination. The bill's penalties now apply to this kind of discrimination, and we are making progress. But, Mr. President, I am puzzled--I see my colleague on his feet, and I am pleased to take another question if he has one, but let me just say to my colleague that I am puzzled by the current approach we are taking. It doesn't trouble me because I am able to speak about what I think should be the priority of this Congress, which is getting disaster relief to people in communities in Minnesota and the Dakotas, and I will be back on that at 5:20 or whenever I can, but I would say to my colleague, I am puzzled with the approach taken here because this bill is not going to pass, and yet my colleague is really--I mean, the last thing I want to do is say something that is going to offend him. I mean, I will in terms of different debate, but I am not going to do it personally, because he is for real. He believes in what he is doing. It seems to me there is a way you could really get the flexibility for the employees and you could really accomplish the goals of that, but I do not get to say that because he is the author. He probably feels he knows best. But I am telling you right now, if you do away with the 40-hour week, you are not going to get the bill passed. You have this 80-hour, 2-week framework which we do not have in the House--their bill is more moderate--you are not going to get this bill passed. You have the flextime where you only get 1 hour off for 1 hour overtime, you are not going to get this bill passed. And if the penalties that my colleague talked about for coercion do not cover this kind of discrimination, then you are not going to get this bill passed.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I would be pleased to yield for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, let me respond to my colleague's question. Let me first of all just say that I have spent enough time as a community organizer, and I have spent enough time with working people, many of whom are nonunion workplaces. One big difference, of course, is that with Federal employees and public employees that a much larger percentage of the work force are unionized and that I know that what in theory can look voluntary and look like a partnership isn't always the case. Whereas, in theory it would look like an employer couldn't say to an employee, ``Look. You know, here is my proposition. I want you to work 50 hours this week, and, yes, that is 10 hours overtime, but you get 30 hours off next week. That is what I want you to do.'' In theory, the employee doesn't have to do it. But anybody who knows anything about the reality of many people in terms of what they deal with at the workplace knows that they don't exactly have a lot of power, and they are not exactly in a position to say no, especially when that job might be the only job there and they have to put food on the table for their kids. People put up with a lot. Mr. President, lest anyone think that I am some sort of devoted to class warfare, let me just examine the facts. Last year the Department of Labor found violations of current overtime law in 13,687 cases involving 170,000 workers. They awarded over $100 million in back pay. The Department's Wage and Hour Division has a current backlog of approximately 40 percent of annual complaints. In the garment industry, an investigatory survey conducted by the Department in Los Angeles last year revealed noncompliance with current overtime law in 55 percent of our shops. In our subcommittee we watched the videotape feature from CBS news which chronicled a ``Battle Against Overtime,'' apparently conducted systematically by one of the country's largest supermarket chains. The news item reported on the company's alleged practice of coercing employees to perform work off the clock; that is, without any pay in order to avoid paying overtime. Mr. President, these practices may not be the norm for most employers but they do demonstrate the need to protect against a bill which will provide employers with a tool which they could use to avoid paying overtime. So I have no doubt that my colleague means exactly what he says. There isn't anybody that believes anything other than that about it. He means what he says. But, what looks good in theory doesn't work in practice. That is the problem. That is why, Mr. President, in the House of Representatives in the piece of legislation that they passed the only thing you have is the comptime. With comptime you get an hour and a half off for the hour that you worked overtime, or you get an hour and a half in pay. That is why this piece of legislation has been called, even by some of the people in the House that supported that bill, too extreme. And it is. Because, Mr. President, what you are going to have here when you do away with a 40-hour week and you get into this 80-hour-week framework is all sorts of potential for abuses of power. Mr. President, if we didn't have the record that I just read to you about some of the existing abuses, and the way in which there is forced overtime right now, I wouldn't worry about it. But, Mr. President, that is the reality. That is the reality. That is one of the problems.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I am pleased to yield for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Did my colleague ask me to yield for a question?

Mr. WELLSTONE. So this piece of legislation, Mr. President, which is supposed to be friendly to families establishes a new framework. It is not the 40-hour week. Second of all, you have a flextime provision which says that you work overtime and then you can take some time off but it is hour for hour. You don't get time and a half off. Mr. President, that hardly represents a family friendly workplace. Mr. President, I regret what I just said to my colleague. He asked me to yield for a question. I certainly will. I got caught up a little bit in sort of the, you know, kind of anger from a couple of minutes ago. I am not being at all gracious. Mr. President, I will continue to speak, but if my colleague has a question, I think he did, I will be pleased to respond. Mr. ASHCROFT addressed the Chair.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I actually won't yield for a question right now.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I will be pleased to talk about S. 4, and will do so. Mr. President, we have here what is called the Family Friendly Workplace Act. Mr. President, in all due respect, it is hardly friendly to families. Mr. President, as I have mentioned earlier, we have to approach legislation sometime in the sense of history. There was once an exchange I had on the floor of the Senate with my colleague from Missouri where we talked about a song, ``Which Side Are You On?'' Florence Reese actually wrote it. Florence Reese was a great troubadour for working people and for unions, especially mine workers. Mr. President, when we were able to pass the Fair Labor Standards Act in the 1930's, that was an enormous step forward for working people. This piece of legislation, Mr. President, essentially wipes out almost 60 years of people's history. Mr. President, for those who are watching this debate, since we are going to talk about this bill for a while before we again talk about disaster relief by the rules that I am now under, for those people that are watching this debate, one of the things that was most important about the Fair Labor Standards Act was the idea of the 40-hour week. The idea was that if you worked overtime you would get overtime pay. Mr. President, I am speaking without notes. So I don't remember the exact figures. But I believe somewhere in the neighborhood of 60 percent of those households with incomes under $20,000 a year depend on overtime pay. So, Mr. President, one of the things which is a dear principle here is that there is no way as a Senator from Minnesota, which is a State that believes in economic justice, that I am going to let any piece of legislation, or at least to the best of my ability I am going to try to prevent it from overturning the Fair Labor Standards Act. So, Mr. President, if you work overtime, you ought to get overtime pay. That is a cherished principle. This piece of legislation wipes that out. And it is called the Family Friendly Workplace Act? Well, Mr. President, let me just make it clear that if you have a situation where you now have a piece of legislation that says that if people work 50 hours or 60 hours or even theoretically 70 hours a week, yes, they might only work 20 hours the next week under this legislation, or 30 hours, or whatever but they don't get any time and a half off. So it becomes a pay cut. That is what it is all about. This isn't the Family Friendly Workplace Act. This is the Paycheck Cut Act.

Mr. WELLSTONE. Mr. President, I thank the Senator from Massachusetts. Mr. President, let me continue. Mr. President, let me now return for a while. We will get back to the disaster relief. Let me now turn to S. 4. I will speak some about S. 4. Mr. President, let me also say to Senator Thurmond, before I do so, that I would like----

Mr. WELLSTONE. I am pleased to yield for a question.

Mr. WELLSTONE. I am pleased to yield for a question in one moment. Let me make it clear--and I will yield for a question in a moment-- what has happened here. I just want my colleagues to know that I am out here for very good reason. They would be out here if it were their States. The Senator from North Dakota is going to join me. But, Mr. President, I have been willing to ask unanimous consent that Senators who want to speak--at least, the Senator from Massachusetts wanted to cover something else as well--but at least speak about Strom Thurmond be able to do so, who has served for so many decades in the Senate, and as long as my resumption on the floor not be counted as a second speech. It is a reasonable unanimous consent. My colleague from my Missouri has not agreed to do that. I just want Senators to understand what is going on here. I am pleased to go on and speak. I just think it is a shame that Senators who want to speak at least about Senator Thurmond are not able to do so. Mr. President, I will go on. I believe my colleague has a question.